On Friday, AMAHouston Seminar Shows Intangibles Strategies.

When it comes to marketing and advertising intangibles there are several flavors. Services is one - banking services or accounting services. There are intangible products too; employee healthcare insurance, for example. Your written policy is a form of physical proof that you are insured; you can’t buy insurance by the pound.

Marketers have spent years, decades, transforming intangibles into various forms of reality so that a wide variety of stakeholders can grasp them. In these cases, it’s not about the purchase but the buy: Stakeholders buy into these intangibles in a number of ways, accepting them into their businesses and their lives. There is a requirement for mental acceptance which is, or should be, brand-driven.

“Selling the Intangible: B2B Service Marketing Strategies” is quite tangible: Three hands-on experts are going to make everything real for you at Friday’s B2B Special Interest Group seminar, from our chapter of the American Marketing Association. Just click here to register if you haven’t already.

Join us at the House of Blues and get fresh insights about bank marketing from William Trout, BBVACompass Director of Internal Communications. Hear about thought leadership as a marketing tool for employee health benefits from Katrina Drake Hudson, Regional Marketing Leader at Humana. And see a first-hand how-to on rebranding accounting services from Christa Gerlovich, Practice Growth Manager for Weaver, LLP.

Oh - you can market insurance by the pound, sort of, with commodity futures contracts*. One particularly successful example (if I say so myself) is this three-dimensional direct mail program sent to hundreds of US ingredients buyers. The campaign promoted commodity contracts on the Chicago Board of Trade. Of course, a futures contract is only mostly intangible. If you screw up the “virtual” becomes intensely physical and you could enjoy 5,000 bushels of soybeans delivered to your driveway.

There’ll be no soybeans at the House of Blues’ Bronze Peacock Room this Friday morning. Just successful strategies from Trout, Hudson and Stranhoner. Since I will be the moderator, I hereby offer you tangible benefits (including a light breakfast) and say “Come on down!”

*Commodity futures are agreements of contracts that are used to purchase or sell a specified amount of a given commodity – in the case of this campaign, corn, rice, soybeans and soybean oil which are used as ingredients in various food products. The Chicago Board of Trade – CBOT – is now part of CME Group. Direct mail campaign created and produced “back in the day” by The Quest Business Agency, Houston, TX. Creative Director/copywriter: Yours truly. Art Director: Jim Prejean. Production Manager: Beth Palmer.